¿Puras Groserías?: Rethinking the Role of Profanity and Graphic Humor in Latin@ Students' Bilingual Wordplay

Abstract

This article explores the role of profanity and graphic humor in the bilingual wordplay of Latin@ middle school students. We highlight the creativity, skill, and communicative competence embedded in this transgressive wordplay, revealing how these youth employed profanity and graphic humor to index ethnic solidarity and construct bilingual identities. We argue that further exploration of such wordplay might well reveal other functions and meanings that are obscured when it is simply dismissed as inappropriate. [bilingual wordplay, Latin@ youth, transgressive language practices, communicative competence] bs_bs_banner

Humor in Father–Daughter Immigration Narratives of Resistance

“…Like many families in Mexican immigrant communities, “having papers” was used as a metonym for U.S. legal status (Mangual Figueroa ), and some young children were aware that you needed official papers to access rights such as carefree border crossing. Through a display of linguistic dexterity in which he drew upon the doble sentido , or double meaning (Martínez and Morales , 337) of papeles , Mateo used humor to bring levity to a serious topic. Humor helped assuage some of the deep pain associated with the term papeles .…”

“…They called him fatty. And he was bald ha ha ha.” Like Mateo often did through the humorous double‐meanings expressed in his talk (Cintrón ; Limón ; Martínez and Morales ) or improvisational children's songs that incorporated Abi as a central character, Abi dexterously drew upon an array of undesirable features in an attempt to outwit her father at his own game (Guerra ). During this improvisational song Abi also included his potential detainment and again deployed humor as a metapragmatic signal to mitigate her harsh words.…”

“…She knocked ferociously and said in a deep, gruff voice “ it's the police ,” as she covered her mouth with her hand to stifle laughter at her own joke (FN 3/27/2011). Through teasing and humorous discursive moves regularly modeled by her father, Abi demonstrated great finesses in her ability to “create humorous allusions…without becoming offensive” (Guerra , 78), while simultaneously fostering intimacy and trust with co‐participants (Martínez and Morales ). Like her father's modeling of humor as resistance, through her teasing she also adopted a mechanism to deal with the harsh reality of potentially being separated from her father due to immigration practices.…”

“…Juan Guerra () illustrates how adults draw upon humor and teasing rituals as forms of entertainment, demonstrations of their rhetorical prowess, and as a vehicle for in‐group solidarity. Within classroom spaces, Ramón Antonio Martínez and Zitlali Morales () illuminate the ways that bilingual Latin@ middle schoolers skillfully draw upon language‐based humor and transgressive wordplay to engage in important identity work that—if tapped into—holds promise for their academic learning. This article builds upon these lineages of humor and linguistic artistry to explore the understudied theme of how fathers draw upon humor as a pedagogical tool with their children.…”

“J'aime to be Funny!”: Humor, Learning, and Identity Construction in High School English as a Second Language Classrooms

“…The linguistic resources multilingual youth enter classrooms with are often overlooked, or devalued in the context of school, and this is particularly evident among students who are racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically minoritized (Martínez & Morales, ). In recent years, however, scholarship has emphasized the importance of conceptualizing humor as both public and private speech that facilitates new language development through the manipulation of form as a means of semantic and pragmatic play (Bell, ; Lantolf, ).…”